I think if you rephrase your question, google gives some good results. For example, those in marketing & branding study the association of colors with feelings.
The article above has sources linked for everything, and depending on how wide you want to go from the literal color of the object, this could be a good direction.
Another direction could be linguistic research studies, where people associate words with colors.
To find this page, I had to start with a basic web search, and then remove false hits (like "Excel"). Here was the final query, maybe it helps.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=words+that+have+a+certain+color+-excel+-Synesthesia+-highlight+-html
(so I removed results with "excel", "Synesthesia", "highlight", and "html". I think in your question, using the word "mapping" will bring up mostly technical results, such as excel)